홈 / MM Romance / The Way He Looked at Me / 챕터 181 - 챕터 190

The Way He Looked at Me의 모든 챕터: 챕터 181 - 챕터 190

195 챕터

181

Some things were not mine to share.The words sat locked behind my teeth, sealed there by years of silence and something far older than habit. What had happened on this mountain that I had been raised inside of was not something I could hand to anyone, no matter how much a part of me wanted to."I'm alright," I said instead, turning back to the stove. "I can still get a test kit sent off before the first snowfall hits. Results come back by email.""Okay." Tim's fingers found the hem of the shirt he was wearing my shirt and he turned the fabric over absently. "So once the snow comes, you're stuck up here?"I kept my eyes on the pan. The old instinct rose immediately to say nothing, to let the question dissolve into the air unanswered. But I pushed against it. For him."Depends on how heavy it gets," I said, my voice coming out low and uneven. "It gets dangerous. There's a point where I won't risk the roads." I left out the part about the snowmobile. Some things he didn't need to k

182

He didn't walk away.That was the part I hadn't expected.No slammed doors. No cold words cutting through the air like a blade. He simply reached down, pulled my pajama bottoms back into place, then wrapped his fingers around mine and drew me forward. His dark eyes, the color of bitter chocolate, spoke the only language he seemed comfortable with. Follow me.So I did.He brought me through a room I suspected was his, then into the bathroom beyond it. A deep, wide tub dominated the corner like something from another world. He crossed to it without a word, twisted the faucet, and let the water begin to rise.I stood where he'd left me and didn't move. I was afraid to. It felt like the kind of moment that could shatter if I breathed wrong and then I'd find myself back in Tranquility, staring at the ceiling, completely alone.He returned to me slowly.His fingers lifted to my face, tracing the bruise that had swollen beneath my eye. The touch was barely there feather-light, careful and

183

His gaze stayed on me the whole time I got dressed. When I finished, he turned and walked toward the kitchen without a word, just a brief glance over his shoulder that was enough of an invitation.A stool waited at the counter. I climbed onto it.He moved around the kitchen like he had a routine, pulling the fridge open and grabbing a carton of eggs without so much as asking what I wanted."Seriously, don't bother." He lifted one shoulder and let it drop. That was apparently the end of that conversation.I dug through my bag. "Hold on, I have to take something." At least I had them on me. Three months' worth, grabbed right before everything went sideways and Jace ended up finding me.He paused. I looked over."Before you ask for two pills. One handles the depression, the other keeps everything else from swinging too far in either direction." A beat. "It's just how I function."Something shifted in his expression. His brow pulled together, tighter than before, and I felt it immediately

184

Jace POVThe windows needed sealing before winter arrived and made itself at home without permission.Tim picked it up quickly. I noticed that about him.We worked our way across the frames without filling the air with unnecessary words, and once the morning wore itself out, I brought us both inside and put food together. He drifted toward the kitchen at one point with that particular expression, the one sitting just before an offer. It never left his mouth. Good.Food carried rules in my house, and those rules didn't bend for company. My hands made the meal, or the meal didn't happen. Packaged things from store shelves had required an adjustment period, but provided the seal was intact and nothing had been touched, I'd worked through that eventually. Anything beyond that boundary stayed on the other side of it.His being here was doing something irritating to my nerves.Working alongside others wasn't something I'd been a stranger to. The Enlightened had operated that way. Bodies mov

185

The scrape of Tim's chair against the floor cut through the silence before I even registered he'd moved. He was already walking away, plate in hand."You haven't finished." My voice came out harder than I meant it to."I know."Something in me snapped. My fist hit the armrest with a force that rattled through my whole arm. "Don't do that."He stopped walking but didn't turn around."You want to feed me." The laugh that left him had no humor in it. "You want to make sure I eat, make sure I'm okay and then tomorrow you'll hand me my bag and point me toward the door. Pick one. You don't get both."My throat tightened. There were things I wanted to say that none of this was simple, that letting him go was costing me something I'd never get back. He was the only person I had ever let close enough to matter. But close wasn't the same as forever. Some gaps couldn't be bridged, no matter how much you wished otherwise.The fight drained out of him before it fully started. His shoulders dropp

186

The words in my head were crashing into each other too loud, too fast, too sharp to grab hold of. Rage was the only thing I could feel clearly, and I threw all of it into pulling against the cuffs. Pain sliced through both wrists. I pulled harder anyway."Stop. You're going to tear your skin open." David's voice cracked slightly. "Jace, please"He reached toward me.I went for his hand with my teeth.He snatched it back fast.My heart was slamming against my ribs so hard it hurt. The world was tilting. Every time something like this happened, every time hands grabbed me, held me down, took me somewhere I didn't choose, my mind collapsed into the same dark place it always had.

187

"I want to release him, believe me but he won't respond to anything I say. The second these cuffs come off, someone is getting hurt. Maybe him. Maybe one of us.""Let me try something." I pressed the phone harder against my ear. "Hold it close to him. Please. Just let him hear my voice."A shuffle of movement. Voices pushing back a small crowd. Then David again, quieter this time, speaking carefully like a man approaching something wild."Jace. Tim's on the line. I'm holding the phone near you. Just listen."What came back wasn't words.It was a sound deep and rough and barely human. The kind of sound a trapped animal makes when it has nothing left but teeth and instinct.

188

"Jace. Look at me."His eyes found mine something behind them flickering, unstable, like a dying bulb catching current for one brief second before it steadied.He took a step forward. My body answered by stepping back. Not terror. Not even close. Whatever pulled at me when he was near had no name, but fear wasn't it.The bed frame caught the back of my knees.I sat down hard.He stood at the edge, trembling from the inside out like his body had become a cage and whatever lived in him had grown too large for it. His hands were clenched. His breathing was controlled in the way that people control things that are seconds from breaking.Then his mouth opened."Need."Rough. Fractured. A word that had clearly fought its way out and barely survived the journey.His eyes didn't leave me. Waiting. Wound tight."Yes or no."My answer was already forming before he finished."Yes. Absolutely yes."The space between us disappeared.Jace povThe restlessness wouldn't leave me.Even after reachin

189

Really looked.Then nodded once. Slow and sure.The room went quiet again, but it was a different kind of quiet now. Something had just been handed to me small, fragile, shaped like trust and the strangest part was how desperately I wanted to protect it.He was doing something to me.Rearranging things inside me I had stopped believing could ever move.And the most frightening part?I was letting him.I had faced wild animals, bitter winters, and years of total isolation.Nothing had ever made me shake like this."No locks,"

190

Tim povDarkness still clung to the room when I gave up trying to sleep.Jace lay beside me, his body restless even in rest turning, settling, never fully still. My chest ached watching him. The man couldn't even find peace unconscious. But he was here. Breathing. And that was enough to make me hold myself completely rigid, terrified that one wrong shift of my weight would steal even this from him.I kept my eyes open and my body still and I thought about everything.What he'd done. What it meant. Most people said things. Jace had actually moved driving out to collect my belongings, coming back with them like it was nothing, like the quiet sacrifice of it was just something he did. He'd made a promise not to lock me away. And now he was sleeping next to me, walls down, guard lowered.For me.Something about that cracked me open in the best way. I'd spent years feeling like furniture in my own life present but overlooked, there but not quite seen. Jace had changed that without even

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